I have around 1,000 satellite images in tiff format, and I want to create a shapefile which will serve as an index to the rasters. This is something similar to a raster catalog, but I do not want to build a raster catalog.

Some obstacles I can forsee, is that the image are georefrenced, so they are not rectangular in shape (I am talking about the data area).

Update
To clarify, I require the polygon to cover only the non-zero (or non nodata) pixels of the raster, and not the entire rectangular raster. Most of the answers so far, give a rectangular polygon, which covers the data, as well as the non-data pixels.

My Image

Result given by tools I have examined (like raster catlog, various Arcscripts, custom Python script given in one of the answers):

It seems like creating a raster catalog, even temporarily would be a good solution to create footprints. You can create a catalog that is unmanaged, which creates a table of references, but leaves the images in their location on the server. It is easy, and relatively quick to do a batch import of rasters to a catalog. Once created, you can export the footprints to a new featureclass and delete the raster catalog. This might be as quick as other options.
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Get SpatialJun 6 '12 at 7:33

mosaic dataset is the way to go. Very easy to accomplish
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Brad NesomJun 6 '12 at 12:30

So in the last image, are the pixels outside the red box NoData or 0? If they are 0, are there pixels in the area you want that are also of 0 value?
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Chad CooperJun 7 '12 at 13:55

1

The pixels outside the red border are nodata; However my multi-spectral data has 0,0,0 as the RGB values for the nodata areas. In both cases, there are no pixels with value 0 inside the required area.
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Devdatta TengsheJun 7 '12 at 14:42

This plugin claims to do what I wanted, but it is failing on an image that I experimented with. I'll try with my real data tomorrow.
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Devdatta TengsheJun 6 '12 at 13:56

I found that this plugin works very well with multi-spectral data, but sometimes gives weird results with single-band pancromatic images.
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Devdatta TengsheJun 8 '12 at 14:25

I agree that the QGIS Image Boundary works the best but is there a tool to do this for vector files where we don't need the "bounding box" or "footprint" but a polygon outlining where data exists.
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GeorgeCAug 7 '12 at 6:07

We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.

It works only on 3D data, and even then does not give expected results. Doesn't work with Satellite Imagery at all.
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Devdatta TengsheFeb 15 '13 at 9:11

Yeah, thats true. I'll leave the answer for others, to be aware of that.
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TomekFeb 15 '13 at 13:54

If you are interested in a scripted solution, try the gdal command nearblack. You can use the flag -white to retrieve data bounded by white space as well. You can polygonize the output to generate a non-rectangular footprint of the raster data.

You could create a raster catalog with a spatial reference assigned, add the raster catalog to ArcMap, and then "Export Footprint". Remember there's the option to create an "UNMANAGED" raster catalog so that you're not making a duplicate of each raster dataset.